Marlena Moreau

Review – It Had to Be You

Background

This short story comes from a prompt of the same name. It all hinged on emphasizing the last word in the sentence.

Plot

For the Original Series Mirror, Mirror episode, I always wondered why Janice Rand wasn’t in it.

Marlena Moreau

Of course I know the real-life reason. It was that actress Grace Lee Whitney had lost her job with the show. But what about an in-universe reason?

Since it is canon that people in the Mirror often kill their superiors in order to get ahead, it makes sense that Marlena Moreau would do the same. This would be when it came to becoming the new Captain’s Woman. Because in a brutal society, that would work the best. It also worked as a retcon to make it so that Rand would have been the previous person to hold that position. Shatner and Whitney had great chemistry and that was another reason Whitney lost her job. Shatner (Kirk) was supposed to remain the bachelor captain. Hence I had another reason to make Rand the original Captain’s Woman.

However, the twist to the story was the addition of an investigator. I write Mirror Universe justice as being essentially nonexistent. So there had to be a compelling reason for an investigation into Rand’s death. I decided that she would have a connection to the Emperor. In my fan fiction, that man would be a descendant of the Mirror Tripp Tucker and Elizabeth Cutler.

The idea I had was that the Mirror Universe Jim Kirk would not necessarily have gotten together with Marlena Moreau in a conventional way. After all, it’s the Mirror.

I had also wondered why Janice Rand wasn’t shown in the Mirror (the real reason is that the actress, Grace Lee Whitney, had left the show). For an in-universe explanation, it made a lot of sense for Marlena to be Janice’s killer. This would also work out rather nicely with my own view of the Mirror Universe, that women receive rather poor treatment. The best thing a woman would be able to do would be to latch onto a man with ambition and power, who could protect her. Yet their circumstances would horribly beat down the women. And therefore they would never consider in a million years the concept of banding together.

Story Postings

Rating

The story is rated T.

Upshot

So there had always been chemistry between William Shatner and Grace Lee Whitney. If Whitney had been around when the Mirror, Mirror episode had originally aired, it would not surprise me if there would have been a similar explanation about Janice.